Category Archives: alternate worlds

Today I went to Google Play, found five volumes of A New System of Practical Husbandry by John Mills (there are more generic names than that, but not many!) and I downloaded them all. And then I downloaded An Essay on the Weather by the same author, too. Of course the real titles are much longer than that because they are eighteenth century books.

Why did I download six massive tomes about obsolete horticulture? Not because I’m into reconstructing old farming methods (much less old British farming methods, which would never be applicable here in California without a tremendous lot of tweaking I am noit qualified for). I grow some fruit trees, some herbs, and kale in my little backyard, and when the weather cooperates perfectly, also some tomatoes. That’s it. Not wheat!

I’m revising The Drummer Boy for what I hope is the final time before submitting. I think I have solved its problems by turning it into a trilogy. As I go along I find more little places where I need more information to prevent idiotic errors. The world of The Drummer Boy is set in a backwards corner of a sort-of-Central/Eastern-Europe, and it starts at what is kind of equivalent to the 1890s-1900s. That is, there are automobiles and telephones and electric lights and iceboxes that use ice blocks, but only in some places. In other places, farmers are living an eighteenth-century life. I figure what was new and scientific in the mid 1700s would be sufficient for my farmers 150 years later.

But of course I can’t depend on this source either! Because, again, the climate, soils, and traditions are different in this fictional place as compared to Britain. So this source is only going to help me think about things, really. It’s better than where I started, though. Oh my. I started with James Frazer’s The Golden Bough,again, not as a final source but to accumulate a few sparks for some of the celebrations and activities Yanek might encounter in his rural childhood. Here Frazer is useful because a lot of the book is a compendium of facts from wherever he could gather them. He had a narrative to uphold, and he wanted it to be generally applicable, so Swabia and Tahiti and Macedonia and Yorkshire were all grist for his mill, when he found them. And–bingo! he had a few Central/Eastern European anecdotes that fit right in with what I wanted to do. The “need fire” which in which Yanek participates is from The Golden Bough. And the “last-sheaf” celebrations that Yanek adores so much are derived from his extensive discussion of Corn Dollies, which appear in various forms all over the landscape. I can no longer tell you which details were from Central/Eastern Europe and which were from somewhere else and which I made up. I could look it up, though.

It’s an obvious idea, of course–to use the last little bit of grain and straw to make one or another kind of decoration/figure/amulet for a ceremony/game/party/prank which may or may not carry over into other times of the year and which may or may not have various kinds of symbolism relating to the passage of time, fertility, sex, death, or outright foolishness. You can explain the widespread appearance of Corn Dollies either by independent invention (because it is such an obvious idea and the specifics vary so much) or by diffusion (because if your neighbors are wrapping up teenagers in bundles of straw and flowers and chasing them around the fields, or your other neighbors are braiding the stalks into figurines and stealing them from each other, doesn’t that sound lot a lot of fun?

However–it’s a good thing I wasn’t clinging to an obsolete mythological thesis for all of the verisimilitude in the book. I have been looking things up as I encountered them, and then one day I was musing online about something to do with the harvest–the use of the scythe, I think–and (ljuser)heleninwales linked me to a video of some people recreating nineteenth century agriculture and I realized what I did not realize before: that you don’t bring the grain in as soon as you cut it. I should have known, right? I’ve seen haystacks and I’ve seen stooks, though I didn’t know that was the name for the grain set out to rest before being taken in for storage. But haystacks are just hay, which is not grain, and I didn’t know the significance of stooks until I saw these videos and heard them named and discussed. So, of course, that needed a sentence or two of revision in each of three or four spots. Not hard to fix, but necessary. Because I’m not going to be that author that gets that review that starts out with “Kemnitzer’s book is appealing on the surface, but for a story that spends so much time in the fields and forest, it is much too vague and inaccurate about country ways.” At least I hope not.

So today I was on that bit about the last-sheaf again, and suddenly felt the need to have a better handle on how long the grain stands in stooks before it comes in. I searched on the question, and guess what came up? This extensive writing by John Mills. And it’s so delicious to read why it’s better to cut the grain before than after rain, and how to keep it from sprouting in the sheaf, and how wheat from India did not grow well in France in the eighteenth century. If you follow Jo Walton you know how ecstatic she can get when she finds a good source on ancient philosophers and poets. Well, that’s exactly how I felt when I discovered these! I felt the same way during my first visit to Prague when I discovered the National Agricultural Museum and its exhibit on František Josef Thomayer, an influential early designer of urban parks and public gardens. My whole being thrilled as I was struck by the revelation that here was exactly what I needed! And not just for the novel. For my heart!

Clearly I need more and more of this material, especially if I can find the equivalent that is related to the interior of Europe. Translated: I can just about read the words to a children’s folksong, with a dictionary, in Czech, but not a centuries-old treatise on agricultural techniques written in Polish, German, or please preserve me, Russian with its maze of Cyrillic letters.

(I’m not really a blind-sentimentalist for “old country ways.” That’s why I need truthful information about the work my rural characters do, and their beliefs about and relationship to the land and all the stuff in it)

November was a busy month for me, and so I’ve fallen behind here. I should tell you why it was so busy! I have been writing and writing, mostly on projects I can’t tell you about till I hear back from people…that’s mostly it. I can tell you this much: I wrote a time travel story with no time travel in it, a first contact story with no contact in it, and a supervillain story with at least one too many villains in it. Also I have been working my way towards total knee replacement, which I now have a date for: not till February, but there’s a lot to do in preparation (I have to get tough!).

So what do I have to catch up on? Two publications, a guest blog, and a future publication (that I can talk about).

The guest blog is here at my friend Heather Rose Jones’ livejournal. She’s the author of, among other things, a series of fantasy novels set in Alpennia, a fictional European-like country in the eraly modern era (that is, not medieval). They’re really good, featuring smart, independent, largely lesbian, women who make sense in their own contexts, and solid, interesting world-building. And coincidentally, my blog is about world-building: why, for example, I have spent weeks physically researching a real-life Central European city for stories that are set in a secondary world that is most definitely not Central Europe.

All I’m going to say about that right now is that world has already produced several “plumblossom” stories (the ones I put up for free at Fictionpress or in The Slash Pile anthologies, or wherever–they are all interconnected and some day will be woven into a single book about rivalries among sentient trees and the people who serve them, as well as magicians both good and evil, semi-self-aware teargas canisters and other objects, terrible history, threatening conditions, and tentatively bright futures): most of a huge fantasy novel involving both a pig spirit and artillery nests, that needs serious sustained attention as soon as I clear the decks with these other projects: and the outline of a novel set in the medieval-equivalent time of that world, involving land fraud, magic, alchemy, and personal loyalty. In other words, I have been playing in it quite vigorously. You can read some of the stories here. The ones in that world are “A Day of Porn” (which is not porn), “The Greenest Boy in Town,” “Stromnik,” and “Striking.” Another story, “Picnic Day Night,” is available at The Slash Pile’s second Halloween anthology “Psychopomp” here.

Are you still with me? Because here’s something you can buy! Less Than Three Press (who else?) has published Tan-ni Fan’s anthology, Missed Connections, and it is available right now from the publisher and here and at most online distributors (that’s really true, too! I somehow ended up searching for Outside and I saw it in online bookstores literally all over the world!). It’s a great big anthology full of big juicy stories about second chances. My story, “Rab+Rob 4ever,” is not science fiction like a lot of my work, but it is fiction about scientists(well, science students, anyway)! Rob has a terrible memory for things that happened in his childhood, so it’s no wonder that when he meets Jack in his last year in college, he doesn’t realize that it’s the same person as Rab, the boy who trailed around after him in their preschool years. Jack (Rab) doesn’t seem any too happy to make Rob’s acquaintance again…

Do you remember me talking about my beloved lesbian mechanics, Elisabeth and Melissa, and their adventures on Route Zero, the road that connects alternate universes? It’s pre-order time for their story at Less than Three. As of today, there’s a sale going on at Less than Three Press, and there’s only five days left till publcation day! Sorry for all the exclamation points, but I’m still new enough at this to be impressed with myself. Elisabeth and Melissa are the kind of mechanics you really want in your community. They have their own tow truck, and Melissa can find your part if it’s available anywhere in the state, and if it isn’t, Elisabeth can fabricate it from a similar part. Even if the car in question comes from nowhere in this world…Elisabeth has a past, though, and while the Grand Jury wants to talk to her, she wants to find out why this odd car’s radio is playing tunes from a future she used to dream about in her past. Contains a non-violent carjacking.

Well, that’s it for today! Watch this space for a giveaway of the A&A ebook!

You have one more day to sign up for the drawing for a free copy of my book Outside! Just go to the post where I announced it, right here, and leave a comment with a way to contact you. I’ll be on the road tomorrow so I’ll probably do it late in the day.

Other upcoming dates: the anthology Missed Connections, edited by the redoubtable Tanni-Fan, which has my story “Rab+Rob 4 Evar,” is coming out November 11, and is available for pre-order now. And my multiple-universes science fiction novella, A and A Salvage, is also available for pre-order and is coming out December 9.

These three stories are really quite different one from another. Outside is about a science lab administrator on a deep space station who takes great effort to ensure that his friends have a good time and learns that he needs to make even a greater effort: “Rab+Rob” is about an environmental sciences student who discovers his memory is even worse than he thought it was: and A and A Salvage is about a pair of lesbian mechanics who figure out that the origin of a mysterious car also gives them dangerous knowledge about the fate of old friends (I have more to say about the world of Outside and also more to say about the adventures of Elisabeth and Melissa from A and A Salvage, but those stories are not written yet).

Also, more details about this later, but I have sold another piece, a story about a fellow whose parents emigrated because they were told their child would marry a tree…

What do you want to know about it? It’s an alternate-worlds science fiction story about lesbian mechanics who have a quaint little repair shop in the coastal mountains and their lives are disrupted by a car that is not from this world . . . involves secrets and lies, of course, and a carjacking, and some crazy driving in the canyons, and 60’s nostalgia and someone else’s civil war . . .